Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s new book about the 2024 presidential race is quickly becoming a collection of things she might have done if only she trusted the voters more.
That assessment is based on a handful of excerpts of 107 Days, the campaign memoir that was written to get out Harris’s side of the story and perhaps reassure both Democratic donors and voters that the final result will be different if they entrust her with the nomination again in 2028.
But the portions of the book widely released to the public up to this point are a reminder that she is an extremely cautious, risk-averse candidate who only won the Democratic nomination the last time around because her party was afraid to let the voters decide.
To recap, Harris has so far that said she would have told former President Joe Biden to think twice about seeking reelection as an 81-year-old but feared it would look too self-serving; that she would have picked former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her running mate, but feared the voters weren’t ready to vote for a black woman and a gay man at the same time; that the rest of her inner circle preferred her actual running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), but he turned out to be a doofus; that Biden had been “distracting” her with fear of unnamed Philadelphia political barons before her only general election debate.
The book always needed a certain amount of second-guessing and introspection, since Harris needs to prove to Democrats that she learned the lessons of her failed presidential campaign (actually her second in as many election cycles). The self-portrait it is drawing doesn’t exactly add up to a profile in courage, however.
“He would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man,” Harris wrote of Buttigieg. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”
In a response on Thursday night, Buttigieg did not exactly endorse Harris’s view that “Pete also knew” she was right “to our mutual sadness.”
“My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories,” he told Politico, adding that it was Barack Obama who turned Indiana blue in 2008 for first time since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Instead of trusting the voters, the 2024 Democrats revamped the primary calendar to give a hobbled Biden a leg up. The schedule began not in Iowa or New Hampshire, where he lost badly in 2020, but in South Carolina, which had rescued his floundering campaign. Democrats also worked to clear the field of credible primary challengers. Once that backfired in spectacular fashion with a catastrophic June general election debate, Harris was anointed as the replacement candidate without any competitive process whatsoever.
Harris told a similar story about why she didn’t caution Biden against a reelection bid. She was in the “worst position” to do so, she claimed. “I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run,” Harris wrote. “He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.” Her book is filled with anecdotes that seem intended to prove beating the other guy wasn’t always his top priority.
When Harris first belatedly, half-heartedly dished on Biden, aides to the former president trashed her anonymously in the media. That probably helped Harris by reminding Democrats of Bidenworld’s insularity and other flaws.
The subsequent excerpts trashing Walz, suggesting that the electorate wasn’t good enough for her, and explaining her rationale for steering clear of Buttigieg may not be as beneficial. There had already been speculation that Harris hadn’t tapped Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), an ascendant Democrat in a critical battleground state she ultimately ended up losing, because he was Jewish and too supportive of Israel in its war on Hamas in Gaza. (Harris’s own account hints Shapiro was too ambitious while other reporting suggests he was reluctant to join the ticket, which may not be mutually exclusive.)
Buttigieg, Shapiro, and perhaps even Walz could at some point be rivals for the 2028 nomination, though Walz has said he isn’t running and is instead seeking a third term as governor.
If anything could make him change his mind, it might be his portrayal in 107 Days. Harris wrote that Saturday Night Live did an “uncanny” impression of her dismayed reaction to Walz’s near-Bidenesque vice presidential debate performance.
“When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at JD [Vance’s]’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, ‘What is happening?’” Harris wrote. “I told the television screen: ‘You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.’”
“I read [Harris’s book] last week, expecting lawyerly calibration and discretion,” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, wrote in a note accompanying a lengthy excerpt his magazine ran. “This careful Harris is present, but so too is another Harris: blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt — and throughout this newsworthy book — she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.”
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That’s one way to put it. Another is that Harris has a pattern of holding back until the hard decisions no longer need to be made.
It is all reminiscent of the song performed by the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz: “But I could show my prowess/Be a lion, not a mouse/If I only had the nerve.”